<table> </table> Budget stories normally draw little interest, and even less with a presidential campaign heating up. But the massive spending bill recently passed by Congress presents President Bush with an enticing opportunity to knock the Capitol Hill spending culture on its keister.</p><p>Congress envisioned a spending package with more than 9,000 earmarks &#8212; specific line items requested by individual members to pay for pet projects.</p><p>But most of those earmarks weren&#8217;t written into the final text of the legislation. Instead, they were stashed in the report of the conference committee that agreed on the wording of the 3,417-page bill.</p><p>Bush signed it. Now, a growing chorus of fiscal conservatives and small-government advocates is urging the president to ignore any earmarks not in the legislative text.</p><p>In a Dec. 18 opinion, the Congressional Research Service agreed that earmarks in committee reports &#8212; but not in the bill &#8212; don&#8217;t have the force of law.</p><p>If Bush were to issue an executive order killing those earmarks, he would reclaim at least part of the credibility lost during the excessive spending of recent years, when Republicans controlled Congress.</p><p>Democrats won a congressional majority in the 2006 election in part by pledging to be better stewards of the taxpayers&#8217; money. Earlier this year, Bush and Democratic leaders agreed to cut the number of earmarks in half &#8212; from the 2005 peak of more than 13,000, to less than 7,000.</p><p>Obviously, the Democratic Congress reneged on its part of the deal. But Bush should not go along, and he has dropped a tantalizing hint that he may not.</p><p>After Congress disgorged its massive spending bill, Bush told a news conference, &#8220;I am instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.&#8221;</p><p>Congressional leaders of both parties are reportedly pressuring the president to drop the issue. They&#8217;re hinting that if Bush issues a kill-the-earmarks executive order, there will be retribution.</p><p>No doubt, but Bush should proceed anyway. Such a move would not only galvanize much of the GOP base, it would suddenly thrust runaway earmarks and federal spending into the headlines and force presidential candidates to address the issue.</p><p>To be sure, even if Bush cancels the earmarks, overall federal spending won&#8217;t drop.</p><p>As a Heritage Foundation paper points out, federal agencies would still spend the money but they&#8217;d do it by relying on established funding formulas or competitive processes. Agencies would generally have the discretion to spend money by merit rather than earmark.</p><p>Earmarking has grown rapidly over the years. In 1996, there were more than 900 earmarks, and this year they exploded: If you include the 2,100 earmarks in the recent defense appropriations bill with the total in the omnibus spending bill, the tally comes to more than 11,100.</p><p>Republicans lost control of Congress largely because of the spectacle of lawmakers doling out taxpayer money to friends and campaign contributors, and Bush was part of the problem.</p><p>Until recently, he has failed to push back against the excesses. Now he has an opportunity to send a message that the rules have changed.